Reproduced items and images from The Umbrella Movement Visual Archive, 2014; installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the Umbrella Movement Visual Archive.

If pink “pussy hats” are the artifacts by which the 2017 Women’s March on Washington will be remembered, what are the objects that signify Hong Kong’s brief moment of revolutionary fervor, the Umbrella Revolution of 2014?[1] The yellow umbrellas used by the protesters to shield themselves from tear gas, and the yellow Post-it notes used in impromptu art installations around the city, come to mind immediately. Not included in Before the Rain, but significant as a comparison, is the work of Hong Kong artist Samson Young. Young’s Stanley (2015) is a large, neon-pink text work that reads, “NOTHING WE DID COULD HAVE SAVED HONG KONG IT WAS ALL WASTED.” This work proclaims the despair felt by many around the globe right now: an unnerving and destabilizing sense that taken-for-granted democratic foundations may be less secure than we assumed. The work of the nine artists in Before the Rain, however, represents a rather different view. They reflect on possibilities of resistance and a sense of exhilaration, albeit at times mixed with sadness.

Images from the Umbrella Movement’s 79 extraordinary days of civil disobedience are unforgettable: the viral smartphone videos of Hong Kong’s streets, the crowds, the barricades, the pepper spray—and perhaps unique to the movement, the spontaneous agit-prop artworks made on Post-it notes, pages torn from school exercise books, sheets of cardboard, and on improvised banners. The ground floor of 4A’s gallery space has been transformed by artist Sampson Wong into Capturing a Hyperevent: Artistic Records of the Umbrella Movement, a visual archive created together with Mikala Tai and other collaborators. The gallery walls are covered by Swing Lam’s maps, Post-it notes, and sketches of the temporary structures established by the protesters, and James Kong’s bird’s-eye time-lapse videos of the protests, made using clandestine cameras hidden around the main locus of the drama. Under a makeshift canopy, visitors can sit and immerse themselves in CCTV and news footage, newspapers, images, blogs, and tweets from the movement.

Sarah Lai. Demarcated Area, 2017 (installation view); performance with installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

Two artists in the exhibition present and subvert tools of bureaucratic control. Upstairs, Sarah Lai’s performance and installation, Demarcated Area (2017), is a collection of black barriers that were moved into different formations at regular intervals by stony-faced security guards at the exhibition opening, causing trepidation for visitors who found themselves unsure of how to navigate their way through the space, or or how to respond to the unnerving presence of the guards. These artifacts of crowd control are reminders of the generally compliant nature of citizens, often accepted as completely normal until they are installed in the unfamiliar context of the gallery. Conceptual artist Luke Ching, no stranger to social issues of bureaucratic and political control (he once became a security guard at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and lobbied for chairs for his fellow guards), presents 150 Lost Items (2014), a series of miniature identity cards that feature him with an open mouth, in a deliberate disruption of the serious poses mandatory for passport and identity photographs. In this work, Ching evokes the indignities of border controls and the apparent randomness of fate that determines who is permitted to cross; the piece bears even greater prescience now than when the exhibition was planned and installed, prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration and the subsequent travel ban.

Luke Ching. 150 Lost Items, 2014; mixed media. Courtesy of the Artist and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

Yuan Goang-Ming’s video The 561st Hour of Occupation (2014) documents the occupation of Taiwan’s legislative chamber by the Sunflower Student Movement. The camera pans across jumbles of bags, posters, drink bottles, and food containers left behind by the departing students. The students themselves have been edited out of the video, and their occupation thus becomes an unsettling absence. Seeing it first in 2015 at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, I found the piece somber, an elegy rather than a celebration. It seemed to suggest that populist uprisings inevitably fail, or, like the Arab Spring, would lead to darker outcomes and the rise of demagogues. Juxtaposed with the other works by the artists here, however, we see that there are important moments when ordinary people refuse to submit to authority.

Left: Yuan Goang-Ming. The 561st Hour of Occupation, 2014; single-channel video. Courtesy of the Artist.
Right: Reproduced items and image from The Umbrella Movement Visual Archive, 2014; installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the Umbrella Movement Visual Archive.

Before the Rain, with its remnants and traces of a populist uprising, is a message of hope and validation. But for me, at least, there is a shadow presence, seen very obliquely, of Beijing in June 4, 1989. Ellen Pau’s 1990 video work The Diversion is the key to this reading of the show: She presented 1960s archival footage of a mass of swimmers jumping into Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor for a swimming race. Lemmings? Or brave souls challenging their very reasonable fear in an impressive display of courage?  On the outside of the gallery, a hand-painted banner hangs from the second-story windows. It reads: “You may say I’m a Dreamer, But I’m Not the Only One.”

Before the Rain will be on view through March 19, 2017.

[1] A series of street protests often called the Umbrella Revolution (雨傘革命), and sometimes also known as “Occupy Central,” took place in Hong Kong from September 26 to December 15, 2014, in response to proposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system. Protesters saw these reforms as an attempt by the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing to screen candidates. The protests were in large part led by young student activists, and exposed deep rifts in Hong Kong’s society during a time of great tension. Protest art was an integral part of the activism, and has been followed by works by Hong Kong artists that emphasize Hong Kong’s unique history, language, and culture.

James Ostrer. Emotion Download 213M, 2016, from The Ego System series; photograph; 101 x 67 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

We love celebrities. Seemingly, even if we hate them. Despite invoking endless torrents of “I fucking hate her!” each time she appears on a website, Kim Kardashian was the most Google-searched person in 2015 across 26 countries and heavily clicked on. Similarly, Donald Trump might make mind-blowingly awful, heavily criticized remarks on a daily basis, but he’s by far and away the most searched for U.S. presidential candidate. Like it or not, we’re hooked.

In his latest body of work, The Ego System, artist James Ostrer is seeking to challenge the idea that our modern icons and the very concept of celebrity isn’t what it seems to be. “I am responding to the vast divide between what we are being sold and what we are actually getting. I’ve labeled them “Emotional Downloads,” as in the process of making them I am trying to remove the information in my head that I realize won’t represent value systems that will lead towards my own happiness.”

Read the full article here.

Lam Tung-pang in his studio, Hong Kong, December 2012, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Artist Lam Tung-pang typifies a specific Hong Kong identity, expressing the excitement but also the anxiety of this particular ‘floating world’. He synthesises his deep knowledge of Chinese art history and his love for traditional ink painting into a highly contemporary practice. Challenging traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture he produces paintings and installations which reflect his knowledge of the Chinese landscape tradition and  embody ideas about memory and history. His signature technique involves painting, drawing or stencilling  images observed and remembered from  Tang, Yuen and Qing Dynasty paintings onto large sheets of plywood.

On my first visit to his studio I saw paintings from his ‘Travel and Leisure’ series which represent the beauty of nature under siege from  encroaching  urbanisation. Lam looks with nostalgia to old Hong Kong. In a city hurtling towards an uncertain future after 2047, the date marking 50 years after the ‘handover’ to China, he worries about what has been lost. He loves his studio in Fo Tan because, he says, he can look out the window and the mountain is always there. There is a sense of permanence, despite the fact that you can see the haze of pollution like a veil over the border with mainland China.

Lam Tung-pang, 'Past Continuous Tense' (detail) charcoal and image transfer on plywood, 2011, image reproduced courtesy of the artist

In many works the misty mountains of literati painting turn into the towers of Hong Kong. At once lyrical and intentionally awkward, like the cheesy museum dioramas of his youth,  they suggest innocence betrayed. TIny model houses, people, animals and trees are attached to some works, creating a toy landscape, an escape into a whimsical fantasy world. “Painting is like playing” he says. Lam himself, however, is immensely serious about what he does. Intense behind owlish spectacles, the artist told me he immerses himself in Chinese artistic traditions but also loves Medieval and Early Renaissance painting. Those intricately detailed backgrounds behind the main action in works by artists such as Piero della Francesca have always been influential.

In December I visited Lam in his new studio. My visit followed a number of high-profile commissions and his selection for the  Saatchi show. He will have a solo booth at Art Basel Hong Kong in May, and has recently exhibited an 8-metre painting, “Things  Happened on the Island” created for the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. A commission for the MTR will be seen next year as well: a 40-metre work for a new station near Hung Hom, where the artist was born. His elation is mixed with sadness at the rapid pace of change, and the submerging of a specifically Hong Kong identity into the enormity of China. Sometimes, he says, “locals feel lost in their own city.” His parents and grandparents came from Fujian Province during the Cultural Revolution and the uncertainty of the second generation migrant is mixed with a fierce loyalty to Hong Kong. This hybridity characterises his sense of himself as an artist. Identity issues come into his practice, he says, “sometimes just as a need for quietness or refuge – like literati scholars in retirement in their gardens.”

Lam Tung-pang, 'Tang Dynasty Horse and Rider', charcoal and acrylic on plywood, 2012, Photograph Luise Guest reproduced courtesy the artist

Lam has been spending days drawing from the collection of ink paintings in the Heritage Museum near Sha Tin, developing works inspired by Tang Dynasty ceramic horses, which he also draws in the antique shops of Hollywood Road. The result is a series of 3-dimensional paintings on wheeled plywood boxes: two-sided horses; one side drawn from a close study of the object itself and the other from its image in a catalogue or a book. These works suggest ideas about the reproducibility and value of traditional objects. If half the ‘Tang’ horses on Hollywood Road are fakes, how are we to think about authenticity and a sense of history? While his work may seem embedded in a distant Chinese past, it is actually all about the here and now.

Currently Lam Tung-pang is travelling in the US on an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, looking at the way that American museums and cultural institutions represent traditional Chinese painting; making work; and giving talks about the sometimes contradictory aspects of his practice.

Lam Tung-pang / Things Happened on the Island / Acrylics, charcoal, pencil, scale model and wooden toys on plywood / 244 x 700 x W 60cm / Acrylics, charcoal, pencil, scale model and wooden toys on plywood / 2013 image courtesy the artist

Joel Morrison, Untitled (Meat Tenderizers), 2012. Stainless steel, 30 1/2 x 16 1/2 x 16 inches (77.5 x 41.9 x 40.6 cm), Version 3 of 3. Photo by Erich Koyama.

In his first solo exhibition in Asia at the Gagosian gallery in Hong Kong, Joel Morrison presents a reasonably entertaining series of recent works that challenges formalist sculpture while engaging in a constant critique of art historical directions. Drawing on readily-available objects utilised in daily life, Morrison’s composite sculptures begin as disparate Duchampian readymades: weather balloons, bullets, mannequin busts and shopping carts, just to list a few. Through a process that begins with casting, these found objects are moulded into forms that look oddly familiar and yet not, then cast in stainless steel, and finally subjected to intense polishing. Forced together, these objects don’t sit too well in their new skins, poking and swelling out of their casts with deliberate stubbornness, creating a rolling landscape on shiny surfaces. Consequently, the physical sum of the parts of these flimsy, ephemeral readymades is a permanent, unrecognisable blanketed structure intended to provoke and outrage. If traditional sculpture concentrates on the materialisation of an intangible idea in three-dimensional space, Morrison’s eccentric, amorphous surfaces seem to reverse the process, becoming figurative the moment his readymades take their final forms.

Joel Morrison, The Reaganomic Youth (version 2), 2012. Stainless steel, 28 1/2 x 18 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 45.7 x 57.2 cm), Ed. of 3. Photo by Erich Koyama.

The polished and glitzy Untitled (2012) piece forged frommeat tenderisersis part Greek sculpture, Medusa-myth and part punk-metal (pun not quite intended), exhibiting both the stateliness of Ancient Greek busts and the flamboyance of pop culture. If Greek busts were commissioned to commemorate the heroics of war, or to serve as propaganda, Morrison’s silver work is an amusingly brilliant commemoration of postmodern’s obsession with consumerist excess and pastiche. No less quirky and alluring are the ironic and arresting steel jaws of a crocodile-like predator used to represent the seductive male lover in Romeo (2010) and bulbous The Reaganomic Youth (2011) that features an overturned bottom half of a shopping cart supported by a fused number of round-ish protrusions.

Joel Morrison, Tomb, 2012, Nickel plated aluminum. 58 x 54 x 2 1/2 inches (147.3 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm), Ed. of 3. Photo by Erich Koyama.

By appropriating forms and ideas in the history of western sculpture, Morrison’s oeuvre recalls the naturalism of the classical era,  the futurist emphasis on energy, movement and the dynamic flows in space, and the conceptual Duchampian readymade. Above all, his forms pay tribute to the works of other modernist sculptures, echoing the organic and abstracted shapes of Barbara Hepworth’s, or the deliberately disproportional, undulating and imperfect reclining forms of Henry Moore. In a playful homage to Frank Stella’s Getty Tomb (1959) for instance, Morrison’s large namesake resembles at first glance, a striped T-shirt made with a reflective surface. If Stella’s famed black, unmodulated series of canvas works were intended to contain no meaning other than existing painted objects, Morrison’s peculiarly shaped Tomb (2012) seems to revoke that formalist abstraction through its rippling drapes and stripes, implying a more complex relationship sculpture has to contemporary attitudes and responses.

Joel Morrison was born in Seattle, Washington in 1976. He received a BA in English Literature at Central Washington University, and an MFA in sculpture at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. Morrison lives and works in Los Angeles. This exhibition will be on show at the Gagosian Hong Kong until 17 November 2012.

FORCE OF FAILURE: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

Cash coupons to purchase works from “A Retrospective of Kwan Sheung Chi", Inkjet print on paper, 2002, Courtesy of artist

In 2002, Kwan Sheung Chi presented A Retrospective of Kwan Sheung Chi, an exhibition of an exhibition, where strategies of organization and self-promotion were translated into works of art. From the cash coupons towards the purchase of Kwan’s works, to paraphernalia featuring Kwan, the grandiose titling of the exhibition coupled with the unconcealed packaging and branding, created a deliberate projection of the bravado of a final year student, perhaps as reflection of the failure and anxieties not just of an artist but also of the structures embedded within a consumer-driven society.

“I am Artist” Exercise Book, Ball pen ink on exercise book, 20.5 x 16.5 cm each page, 2003 - 2007, Courtesy of artist

This questioning of the place and points of failure and success through the persona of a struggling artist continues in I am Artist, where the words “I am Artist” were written in exercise books and accompanied a series of statements revised annually. In 2005, his statement testified that he would price the work based on the hourly-rate agreed upon between him and the potential buyer. This statement was revised in subsequent years and in 2007, stated that he would produce the work only upon commission or for exhibiting. Through the use of language and writing, the contrast between the painstaking process of the “I am artist” exercise books with the reworded statements accounting for opportunities of financial gain point towards the conflict and choices between the laborious and often invisible practice of art-making and techniques of success which one could acquire to advance in the art market.

A Dead Mosquito, Artist’s hair & blood, Life size, 2008, Courtesy of artist

The course of the artistic struggle is captured within A Dead Mosquito, a work formed by the hair and blood of Kwan, installed to be almost invisible save for wall labels which call attention to its presence. The bodily material and almost insignificant size of the work evokes a deeply poetic and personal gesture of an artist, and art work, dwarfed and swatted.

It’s difficult to stand up as a person. I finally understand why he has been lying there for years, Black & white photography, 50 x 50 cm, 2009, Courtesy of artist

It appears that Kwan has completed one circuit where the bravado of a flailing artist has evolved towards a reflective questioning of failure in life and persistence in faith, with No matter, Try again, Fail again, his first solo exhibition in 2009 after A Retrospective of Kwan Sheung Chi in 2002. With the passage of time and a practice filled with experimentation across media, this opportunity for a retrospective is instead used for a new series of works including It’s difficult to stand up as a person. I finally understand why he has been lying there for years, that underlie a dominant sense of introspection. The exhibition culminated in an ironic auction of a statement the artist had written in 2008 which testified that he would refrain from selling any works for 3 years, and collectively, the works examine failure beyond the art context, as a thread which weaves across the fragility of intentions.

Kwan (b. 1980) graduated in Fine Art from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2003 and in recent years, has been involved in practices to integrate art with the community, co-founding the Hong Kong Arts Discovery Channel, hkPARTg (Political Art Group) and Woofer Ten. He will be exhibiting video works in Art Fair Tokyo which runs from 1 to 3 April 2011.